I love WordPress… ok scratch that… I ADORE WordPress! I have used it for several of my own personal blogs, as well as to develop blogs and web sites for clients.

However the more I use it – especially for my own projects where I have full creative reign – I am constantly amazed by just how much it is capable of.

Not Just For Blogging – A Live Case Study

WordPress is incredibly versatile, in that although it is primarily known as a blogging platform, it can be used to run a non-blog web site as well.

I had been intrigued by the varied uses of WordPress, and knew that it was time to upgrade my own business web site to use the platform. Web designers / developers are often most critical of their own work and I was very specific as to how I wanted my own site to function.

I’ve finally given WordPress’ capabilities a full and through test by converting my own site from static HTML to WordPress.

This Is What They Call “WordPress as a CMS”

It is WordPress’ administrative area that turns it into a CMS or Content Management System. The WordPress admin area provides a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor – similar to a mini-version of Microsoft Word.

This allows virtually anyone to add and edit content themselves – all through their web browser – and without knowledge of HTML.

Of course, for more advanced users, there is a “code view” option where you can edit HTML code in a page, post or article, but it is not necessary for creating simple content.

Initial Settings – Permalinks and Comments

The WordPress installation process is a fairly simple one, assuming you have the right web hosting (which must be capable of supporting the PHP programming language, and running MySQL databases).

Once installed, there are several settings to update. Some of the essentials being to update the Permalink structure, and in the case of a web site vs blog, I wanted to remove the comment features, as well.

Permalinks – also known as “pretty URL’s” – change your post URL’s from something like “/index.php?p=364″ to “/web-design/wordpress-as-cms/”

Typically with a blog, posts are setup with date based permalinks. In the case of the main site, however, I wanted to go with a more traditional format of “/category/postname/”- which help give the illusion that all areas of the site are Pages, as opposed to a combination of Pages and Posts.

I also turned off Comments and Trackbacks (links from other sites back to your own) throughout the site. Comments are an essential part of a blog, but not something I wanted on the main web site.

The comment settings are updated through the WordPress admin area, however I took this a step further by also removing the comment loop from my template files – basically just because I didn’t want a notice that “Comments are closed” on every page of the site, as well.